This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined at the end of the text of this specification, prior to the claims.
Legacy and 3G networks are optimized in a traditional approach by NOCs and field technicians, e.g., by analyzing KPIs and alarms. Profitability for operators of cellular networks, including the legacy and 3G networks, is being challenged with an exponential increase in NEs:                1) Rapid expansion of 3G networks to handle increase in data services makes a traditional optimization approach costly.        2) Introduction of 4G networks that must co-exist with 3G/2.5G for some time.        3) Advent of heterogeneous networks will significantly increase number of NEs even more.Consequently, the traditional approaches for network optimization need improvement.        